Gun Research Silenced by Cut in Funds, Docs Say

Restrictions on gun violence research have stymied scientific efforts to find preventive solutions to mass shootings, such as the one in Newtown, Conn., according to physician researchers.

The CDC has been stifled by language attached to a House of Representatives appropriations bill in 1996 that said "none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the CDC may be used to advocate or promote gun control," according to Frederick Rivara, MD, of Seattle Children's Hospital in Washington, and Arthur Kellermann, MD, of the RAND Corporation in Washington.

"The nation might be in a better position to act if medical and public health officials had continued to study these issues as diligently as some of us did between 1985 and 1997," they wrote online in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

In 1996, pro-gun legislation removed $2.6 million from the CDC's budget -- the same amount the agency had spent on firearm injury research in the year prior.

The funds were "restored in joint conference committee, but the money was earmarked for traumatic brain injury research," with a caveat that restricted future attempts at researching restrictions on firearms, they wrote.

The authors noted that 17 years after the legislative warning, the CDC's website still lacks specific links to information on preventing gun-related violence.

Rivara and Kellermann also pointed out that other agencies have seen similar restrictions on firearms research. For instance, after a 2009 case-control study looking at whether "carrying a gun increases or decreases the risk of firearm assault" was funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Congress extended the restrictive language it applied to the CDC "to all HHS agencies, including the NIH."

Answers to questions about private gun ownership and gun injuries and deaths cannot be found without restoring the ability of the CDC and other government agencies to study, and fund studies on, gun-related injuries, echoed Jerome Kassirer, MD, of Tufts University in Boston, in a viewpoint published online in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

"We must resist all efforts such as a Florida law that restricts physicians' ability to talk to patients about the risks of guns and routinely inquire about whether they own firearms." National leaders must be pressed into passing legislation that requires registration, background checks, and waiting periods for all gun purchases, he added.

Kassirer noted that to achieve these goals requires leadership "at the highest levels of government," in addition to "courage, persistence, and fortitude." He added that few politicians have been willing to start the dialogue on new gun restrictions, particularly after the assault weapons ban expired in 2004 under the administration of George W. Bush.

"We must not tolerate a situation in which some irrational, seriously disturbed person with a grudge can quickly blow us to bits along with dozens of others," he concluded.

Rivara is the editor of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

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